countries. This would clearly violate Principle 21 of the Declaration of the 1972 United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment in Stock- holm which postulates that nation-states’ ‘sover-
eign right to exploit their own resources’ is subject to not causing ‘damage to the environment of
other states or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction’ Molitor, 1991, p. 83. This
principle has been reiterated in the preamble to the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change United Nations, 1992.
Third, historical accountability is supported by the principle of equality of opportunity. The natu-
ral absorptive capacity of the planet earth that allows for the decay of a certain amount of green-
house gas emissions truly belongs to nobody and should therefore be equally assigned to everybody
in order to give everybody equal opportunity to benefit from emissions. To account for historical
emissions ensures equality of opportunity to use the global resource atmosphere, no matter where
or when he or she happens to live. To ignore historical accountability would mean to privilege
those who lived in the past in the developed countries and to discriminate against those who
live in the present or will live in the future devel- oping countries. It is sometimes suggested in the
spirit of Locke and Nozick that a long history of emissions might have established the right for
developed countries to prolong current emission levels into the future and that such ‘squatter’s
rights’ can be derived from a common law doc- trine of ‘adverse possession’ e.g. Young and
Wolf, 1991. Such a suggestion ignores the fact, however, that even Nozick 1974, p. 175, ac-
knowledged that an appropriation of property rights can only be regarded as just if ‘the situation
of others is not worsened’, which is clearly not the case with global warming.
3. A refutation of some objections against historical accountability
Let us turn to some objections against historical accountability now and try to refute them. A first
objection claims that past generations have been ignorant of the detrimental consequences of emit-
ting greenhouse gases and that the developed countries should therefore not be held account-
able for historic emissions Grubb, 1995, p. 491. While the first warning of global warming dates
back to the last century Arrhenius, 1896, it is presumably fair to say that it was not before the
mid 1980s that the public and decision-makers became aware of the greenhouse effect. Does this
therefore imply that emissions before, say, 1985 can be justly ignored? The answer is no. It is an
established principle of the legal system of almost every country that ignorance does not exempt one
from liability for damage caused in the case of civil law or from punishment in the case of crimi-
nal law. But surely, liability and punishment is often lower in case of ignorance than in case of
conscious or even deliberate infliction of harm. Does it follow therefore that while historical ac-
countability might be accepted, past emissions should be heavily discounted because of igno-
rance? Again, the answer is no. Historical ac- countability does not depend on past generations
having deliberately or consciously caused harm to the global commons. It is not about blame or
collective moral guilt, as Beckerman and Pasek 1995, p. 410, suggest, not even about awareness
of harm caused, but about assigning an equal share of the beneficent existence of the absorptive
capacity of nature to every individual, indepen- dent of his or her place in either space or time.
The developed countries have exploited this ca- pacity in excess of what an equal per capita
allocation would have granted them. Now they must be held accountable for it.
A second objection holds that the present gen- eration of developed countries must not be held
accountable for something that was caused not by themselves, but by individuals in the past who are
long since dead Beckerman and Pasek, 1995, p. 410. So even if historical accountability was ac-
cepted, this argument would call for limiting it to a period of the last 50 years or so. This objection
raises a number of difficult and contentious issues that reach into debates far beyond global warm-
ing. For example, most young Germans seem to accept that while none of them can justifiably be
blamed for Nazi crimes undertaken more than half a century ago, as a people they are held
accountable for what some of their ancestors did. Similarly, we are currently witnessing the phe-
nomenon that Swiss and other banks as well as German companies cannot uphold their position
that they should not compensate for wrongs done by banks and companies in the past that were
different from the current ones in all but the name. Their legalistic claim would presumably
survive in court, but the political and moral pres- sure forces them to be accountable whether legally
required to do so or not because it is felt that they benefited from the wrongs of the past.
But would it not be utterly wrong to directly compare war atrocities and genocide to the emis-
sion of greenhouse gases? Yes, of course. How- ever, the very last point made above brings us
back to the issue of global warming. The funda- mental counter-argument against not being held
accountable for emissions undertaken by past generations is that the current developed countries
readily accept the benefits from past emissions in the form of their high standard of living and
should therefore not be exempted from being held accountable for the detrimental side-effects with
which their living standards were achieved.
4
There can be no doubt that the development of the
‘Northern’ countries was eased, if not made feasi- ble in the first place, by having had the possibility
of burning large amounts of fossil fuel with the consequence of an accumulation of carbon diox-
ide in the atmosphere, the major greenhouse gas with a long atmospheric residence time. Janssen et
al. 1992 have found a significant relationship between GNP per capita and the relative contri-
bution to the carbon dioxide concentration rise by fossil fuel combustion per capita in a regression
analysis over 11 world regions. The relative re- gional contribution to the carbon dioxide concen-
tration explains two-thirds of the variations in GNP per capita in 1990 r
2
= 0.67.
A third objection against full historical ac- countability holds that some of the benefits of
past emissions are not confined to the emitting countries. Grubb et al. 1992, p. 316 for example,
argue that past emissions enabled the develop- ment of public goods such as modern medicine or
better technologies that have also raised living standards in developing countries and make it
easier for later developing countries to gain the same living standards with less emissions. In prin-
ciple, this argument is correct, but it is difficult to quantify the exact share of emissions that can be
attributed to the provision of these kinds of public goods. My guess is that most scholars would
agree that the vast bulk of emissions generated benefits to the developed countries themselves and
not to the world as a whole. Maybe, therefore, historical emissions should be slightly discounted,
but the argument does not invalidate historical accountability as such.
A fourth objection is based on practical rea- sons. Because of boundary changes, so the argu-
ment goes, put forward by Grubb et al. 1992, p. 316, it will be difficult to attribute past emissions
to current nation states. The break-up of the Soviet Union as well as the creation of new
nations in the process of decolonization are often invoked as examples. The question is whether
these boundary changes really pose that much of a problem, however. For, firstly, the boundaries
of many of the major emitters in the past, like Northern America, Western Europe, Japan,
Australia and New Zealand, have been relatively stable over time, at least much more stable than
the boundaries of countries in the developing world. Second, where boundary changes have oc-
curred, as in the case of the former Soviet Union, there is no reason why a new nation-state should
not be held accountable for emissions that were undertaken on the territory within its current
boundaries. If such detailed statistical data on fossil fuel consumption and chlorofluorocarbon
CFC emissions cannot be traced back directly, then one can take population share or GNP share
as a proxy. Thirdly, if one feels uneasy about the implications of boundary changes in the last cen-
tury, then one might want to restrict historical accountability to some time in this century. This
might also be a good idea given that the reliability of historical emission data in general decreases for
periods longer back in time.
A fifth objection is again based on practical reasons. Because historical accountability would
4
Again this argument does not depend on morally blaming past generations in developed countries for their emissions.
mean that either the developed countries sooner or later have to drastically cut back their green-
house gas emissions, or have to buy substantial amounts of permits in the case of a tradable
emission permit system from the developing coun- tries, an equal per capita allocation rule with
historical accountability in its pure version would require massive economic costs for developed
countries. Rose et al. 1998 provide some figures on the differences in costs for developed countries
following from different allocation rules.
5
For a global gross emission reduction of 16.5 by 2020,
Rose et al. compute a present cost to Annex 1 countries of 119.2 billion of 1990 US dollars if
emission permits are ‘grandfathered’. If the same emission reduction is achieved with emission per-
mits allocated on an equal per capita basis, Annex 1 countries face costs of 913.6 billion of 1990 US
dollars, most of which result from buying emis- sion permits from developing countries. Rose et
al. 1998 do not compute costs to Annex 1 countries for the equal per capita allocation rule
with historical accountability, but costs would, of course, be even higher.
Barrett 1992, p. 106, for example, therefore dismisses equal per capita allocation with histori-
cal accountability as being politically non-viable: there will be rather no global agreement on global
warming whatsoever than one that allocates per- mits on an equal per capita basis and holds
countries accountable for historic emissions. On this objection it has to be said that a right princi-
ple is not refuted by the mere fact of not currently being politically feasible. While it makes sense for
developing countries not to insist on a strict appli- cation of equal per capita emission rights with
historical accountability now, they would be ill advised to give up their insistence on this alloca-
tion rule coming into effect some time not too far into the future. In the meantime they might accept
partly or fully another allocation rule if they have the clear commitment from developed countries
that eventually they would give in towards an equal sharing of the global commons.
A sixth objection claims that historical account- ability is almost irrelevant because it is closely
correlated with current emissions. Gru¨bler and Fujii 1991, p. 1406, compute that the developed
world is responsible for 85.9 of the contribution in the increase in atmospheric concentration of
carbon dioxide since 1800, but also for 73.6 of current carbon dioxide emissions in 1987, while
their population share is only approximately 21 Bos et al., 1994. The reason why the developing
countries should insist on historical accountabil- ity, nevertheless, and not just on an equal per
capita rule without historical accountability, is twofold: first, the difference between historically
accumulated and current carbon dioxide emis- sions of developed countries is likely to increase in
the future. This is because current emissions of developing countries are likely to increase faster
than those of developed countries and because of the time lag until this translates into significantly
lower cumulated emissions for developed coun- tries. The second reason is that methane, the
second most important greenhouse gas after car- bon dioxide, has a relatively low estimated atmo-
spheric residence time of 10 years Smith 1995, p. 24. Because developing countries emit rela-
tively more methane than carbon dioxide than the developed countries do, and because of the low
residence time of methane, the gap between his- torical and current emissions will widen if the
‘comprehensive’ approach is taken. Eventually, therefore, the difference between historical and
current emissions will matter.
4. Conclusion
